Google machine-guns unpopular social products

Identity-hoarder Google has killed various social products that failed to capture the interweb's hive brain in the way it clearly thinks Google+ has done.

As part of Larry Page's drive to make the Chocolate Factory's products appear more uniform across the vast Google estate, the company confirmed it was culling a host of webby experiments that didn't take off.

It is taking out and shooting Wave, Friend Connect, Bookmarks Lists, Gears, Search Timeline and Knol.

A common theme runs through all of these products: each one having been dipped in Web2.0rhea.

Sadly none of them came up smelling of roses.

Wave was in fact binned by Google in August last year, after it confirmed that the unpopular product would live on until at least the end of 2010.

Come the end of January next year Google said it would make Wave a read-only online ghost town. The ad broker will kill that product come 30 April 2012.

"You’ll be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. If you’d like to continue using this technology, there are a number of open-source projects, including Apache Wave and Walkaround," Google said.

The Friend Connect product will be culled in March. In the meantime, Mountain View is urging users of that service to create a *drum roll* Google+ page.

And Gears will very shortly be switched off. The kill date is set for next month.

"Gears-based Gmail and Calendar offline will stop working across all browsers, and later in December Gears will no longer be available for download," the company explained.

"This is part of our effort to help incorporate offline capabilities into HTML5, and we’ve made a lot of progress. For example, you can access Gmail, Calendar and Docs offline in Chrome."

You can pay your respects by viewing the full death warrant list here.